Abstract
This chapter reviews the dynamics of systemic and institutional governance. Firstly, the features of this dynamics before the introduction of the autonomistic policy – when the Italian case was characterized by a centralized and balkanized system – are summarized. Then it is shown how in the 20 years following the launch of the autonomistic policy structural problems has persisted both in institutional governance and in the systemic one. On the one hand, universities have continued to self-govern themselves by following the inherited template; on the other hand, Italian governments have shown a substantial inability to steer the system at a distance. These features seem to have been only marginally changed by the implementation of the 2010 reform.
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Notes
- 1.
The name given to these networks – a name inherited from the elitist university system – was ‘school’. With the transition to a mass HE system, and thus with the substantial increase in the numbers of teaching staff, the term ‘school’ may appear excessively neutral. In fact, while this term implied the existence of relational networks the cohesion of which was based on the interweaving of material interests (control over the professorial chairs within a certain subject at national level) and of professional interests (the sharing of a given scientific paradigm), the increase in the number of professors in the mass university undermined the cohesion and homogeneity of the major schools, which subjected to the pressure of the numbers, exploded. Therefore these relational networks became less stable, and based more on temporary material interests than on the sharing of a given scientific approach. The fundamental work to be referred to for a comparative analysis of the working logic of subjects and ‘schools’ is that of Becher (1989).
- 2.
This was particularly the case from the 1970s onwards, when the explosion in student numbers and the consequent increase in the number of teaching staff meant there was less likelihood of promotion by working under the aegis of a specific full professor.
- 3.
One of the strongest hypotheses submitted by Giglioli (1979) in his important work on the Italian academic guilds is indeed the one concerning the mediation between the system’s centre and periphery, which in Giglioli’s view had been passed on to the political parties and the trade unions subsequent to the advent of mass HE. This hypothesis, which is certainly capable of explaining the workings of system governance right through the 1970s and the early 1980s, would seem, as we shall try to show later, less impelling in regard to the dynamics witnessed during the late 1980s and the 1990s, particularly as far as the role of Italy’s political parties is concerned.
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Capano, G., Regini, M., Turri, M. (2016). The Transformation of Systemic and Institutional Governance. In: Changing Governance in Universities. Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54817-7_9
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